One Month Later, Obama Still Has Less Than 51% Of Popular Vote

One month after the election, Obama still can't crack the 51% level in the popular vote.

With 127.6 million votes counted, he's still at 50.88%, only just slightly better than George W. Bush's 2004 win with 50.73% when 122.3 million voted.

W didn't have a mandate then, and Obama doesn't now.

The truly remarkable thing about the presidential election remains the voters' giant shoulder shrug in the worst economy since WWII. We'll never know how things might have turned out had the Republicans not picked a me-too liberal and run a real conservative instead of Mitt Romney, whose first act after his nomination was formalized was to trot out his wife to assure us all how conservative was her husband. Liberal Democrats aren't the only ones suffering from projection syndrome.

As it was the voters shrugged in comparison to 2008 and 2004 when 43% and 42% of the population voted. This year just 40% did.

As FDR bought election after election during the Great Depression of the 1930s with direct federal assistance programs and interventions in the New Deal and culminating in the Social Security Act of 1935 in the Second New Deal, Obama has similarly blunted the pain of our economic straits with massive expansions of unemployment insurance, food stamps, welfare and disability, cell phones, heating assistance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, culminating in the Supreme Court's validation this summer of ObamaCare.

Whatever else may be said, doling out the goodies worked then, and it has worked again, which speaks volumes about the ineffectual nature of the kind of conservative revolution worked by Ronald Reagan, which was no revolution because it was at heart a compromise with the liberal welfare state, not an overturning of it.

Half of America may still hunger for a real meal of conservatism, but so far, all they've been fed are Twinkies.

This 47% Explains Why Democrats Want To Go Over The Fiscal Cliff

It's funny how 47% keeps coming up.

That's supposed to be the number of people who wouldn't vote for Romney because they were "the takers". 47% also turned out to be the percentage which actually ended up voting for Romney. And now it turns out that 47% is also the percentage of all the wages earned in this country by the middle class last year, which now stands to lose the most when Democrats shove them over the fiscal cliff because Obama won. They didn't show that ad of Paul Ryan shoving that lady in the wheelchair over the cliff for nothing. When you suffer from liberal projection syndrome, every time you accuse someone else you're just telegraphing what you intend to do yourself.

Nearly $3 trillion of the $6.2 trillion of wages in America in 2011, 46.8%, was made by people making between only $20,000 and $75,000 per year, and the only thing standing in the way of their taxes going up is President Obama's insistence that his victory means everything and the Republicans' victory in the House means nothing.

Democrats and liberal Republicans both cast their greedy eyes on those eleven compensation intervals piled up all together starting near the bottom of the income ladder in blue in the chart because not coincidentally those eleven together just happen to represent all the income aggregates which are also the largest of all, each in excess of $200 billion in 2011. We're talking about 71 million wage earners in this country out of 151 million who make all that money, which, oh my gosh, is also 47% of the workers.

Hm.

You'll look in vain for any aggregates among the very rich coming anywhere close to that kind of money, quite simply because there just aren't enough rich people in America to pile up tranches of $200 billion. Oh, there's  830,000 people accounting for, say $184 billion, who make between $200,000 and $250,000. Your dentist, probably. And then there's 275,000 Americans who make between $500,000 and $1 million. They account for just $183 billion. Some of these people probably own your favorite restaurants.

No, all the big piles of dough the Democrats "need" are "down low" because that's where all the people are, and the Democrats are comin' for you!  

So get ready all you people out there who voted for Obama, your taxes are going up big time, from this:

2013 Bush tax brackets

to this:

2013 Obama tax brackets

Have fun stormin' the castle!

Peter Schiff Reminds Us That The Debt Ceiling Isn't Original To The Country

For RealClearMarkets, here:

The debt ceiling itself is both an ill-conceived compromise and a relic of past governmental integrity. For its first 128 years as a republic, the United States was able to function without a debt ceiling. This was possible for the simple reason that U.S. government had no central bank and could not borrow beyond its ability to repay through taxation. And since the ability to tax is always limited by taxpayers' assets (and their extreme hostility to those who want to take them), legal gimmicks were not needed to prevent Congress from spending too freely. But the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 gave the Federal Government a potential means to borrow indefinitely by having the new bank buy its debt. Sensing this danger, the original Federal Reserve Act of 1913 prohibited the Fed from buying or holding government debt.

But just four years later the United States needed a means to raise money quickly to pay for its efforts in the First World War. The government passed an amendment to the charter to allow the Fed to purchase Treasury Bonds. Fearing (correctly) that this would create a mechanism for perpetual debt expansion, conservative lawmakers insisted that the amendment include a "debt ceiling" provision that would cap the amount that the government could borrow.

Stalin's Crimes Are Untold In Oliver Stone's Untold History Of The US

If anything is untold in Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States, it's the history of Stalin's crimes while the US under FDR was still friendly with him.

Under Obama apologists for socialism from Milos Forman to Oliver Stone are crawling out from underneath their rocks.

And if they get what they want, we will all be swept away.

"According to evidence released from secret archives since the dissolution of the Soviet Union . . . [just] during 1937 and 1938, when the Great Terror was at its height, the security organs detained for alleged 'anti-Soviet activities' 1,548,366 persons, of whom 681,692 were shot -- an average of 1,000 executions a day. The majority of the survivors ended up in hard-labor camps. (For comparison, the tsarist regime between 1825 and 1910 executed for political crimes 3,932 persons.) In 1941, when Germany invaded the USSR, camps run by the Gulag, their main administrative body, held 2,350,000 inmates, or 1.4 percent of the country's population. The slave laborers performed important economic functions, being employed on large construction projects and forced to cut timber in the far north. No one responsible for these crimes against innocent people was tried after the Soviet Union had collapsed; indeed, they did not even suffer exposure or moral opprobrium but continued to lead normal lives.

"Censuses revealed that between 1932 and 1939 -- that is, after collectivization but before World War II -- the population of the Soviet Union decreased by 9 to 10 million people.

". . . existing humanity was debris, the refuse of a doomed world, and killing it off was a matter of no consequence."

-- Richard Pipes, Communism: A History (New York, 2001), 67ff.

Obama Milks Air Force One and Marine One To Toy Shop

Obama went to Pennsylvania to talk up his tax hike, slam Republicans, and then do a little toy shopping. Keith Koffler's bullshit detector went off, here, when he found out Marvin Nicholson, the caddy, was carrying packages on their return to the White House marked K'nex, where Obama spoke.

US vs. EuroArea17 GDP Growth Rates Since 2007

Latest EA17 (and EU27) performance discussed here.

After 4.7 Years, UK GDP Remains In Depression

The top chart, discussed here, shows the failure to recover to zero after 56 months compared to the same point in previous recessions. The lower chart shows GDP rates of growth from October 2006 to the latest available figures.

How To Know We've Lost The Country

When the likes of a Larry Kudlow, who plays the part of a spokesman for one of our important values and should know better than to descend to vulgarianism in public, gets so upset about raising taxes in the teeth of economic stagnation that he lets loose with "effing".

Today, at the end of the second hour of the program, right after which he complains about the loss of spirituality in America!

Really Larry, someone's got to have some class. If not you, who?

Why Obama And Dems Will Let Bush Tax Cuts Expire

Because in order to transform the taxpayer, first you have to destroy the taxpayer.

Real Retail Sales Still Have Not Bested The 2006 Peak

Data through September 2012, here.

Q3 2012 GDP Revised Up To 2.7% From 2.0% In Second Estimate

The full Bureau of Economic Analysis pdf may be found here.

Only two quarters have come in higher under Obama, the fourth quarters of 2009 and 2011 at 4.0% and 4.1% respectively.

All other quarterly reports of GDP have been lower than today's 2.7% report. It's appalling that there have been no reports in the 3.0s since Obama took the helm, especially after the depths to which we sank.

This is idle speed. The car is running in the driveway, warming up, but that's about it.

Democrat Senate Majority Leader Dirty Harry Changes His Tune

"The only way you can change the rule in this body is through a rule that now says, to change a rule in the Senate rules to break a filibuster still requires 67 votes. You can't do it with 60. You certainly cannot do it with 51."

-- 2005 

Hillary's Indentured Servitude To Obama: After 4 Years $25 Million Debt Is $73K

If there were really such a groundswell for Hillary, if there were really such a division in the Democrat Party between her partisans and Obama's, the one clamoring for her liberalism vs. the other urging Obama's radicalism, why has it taken this long to retire a measly $25 million campaign debt in a world of billion dollar campaigns?

Hillary isn't going away. She's been gone a long time, and the Democrat Party is a completely radicalized party.

Story here.

Oswald Spengler Warned Us About "Revenge" Communists Like Obama

"But there are two sorts of Communist. The one, the credulous type, obsessed by doctrine or feminine sentimentality, remote from and hostile to the world, condemns the wealth of the wicked who prosper and also, at times, the poverty of the good who do not prosper. This lands him either in vague Utopias or throws him back upon asceticism, the monastic life, Bohemia, or vagabondism, which proclaims the futility of all economic effort. But the other, the "worldly" type with the realist political outlook, hopes through its followers to destroy society, either from envy or revenge, because of the low place assigned in it to their personality and talents, or, alternatively, to carry away the masses by some program or other for the satisfaction of his own will-to-power. But this, too, likes to hide itself under the cloak of some religion."

-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1933

"Voting's the best revenge."

-- Barack Obama, November 2, 2012 (here)

Destruction is the predicate of transformation.

ObamaCare Part-Times 59 Cedar Falls, Iowa, Public Employees

Because ObamaCare has a look-back period of one year for determining who must be offered health insurance, employers all across America are cutting back the hours of every employee they can to 29 per week right now in order to be exempt from the provisions starting in 2014.

The latest employer in the news is Cedar Falls, Iowa, which hopes to save about $850,000 by cutting its 32 hour workers to 29 hours, as reported here:

City attorney Tom Meyer said if every one of those 59 workers were to remain at 30 hours per week and get health insurance, it could cost the city as much as $850,000 per year.

Marijuana Makes At Least 2% Of Its Consumers Insane

So says a story for The UK Independent, here:

The long-suspected link between consuming cannabis and developing schizophrenia has been repeatedly confirmed by recent studies. Observers say that for cannabis the present moment is similar to that half a century ago when scientific proof of a connection between smoking tobacco and cancer became so strong that no serious doctor or scientist could deny it. ...

Sir Robin Murray, Professor of psychiatric research at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, says that studies show that "if the risk of schizophrenia for the general population is about one per cent, the evidence is that, if you take ordinary cannabis, it is two per cent; if you smoke regularly you might push it up to four per cent; and if you smoke 'skunk' every day you push it up to eight per cent".

If you were wondering why America is the way it is under Obama, you now know why.

Romney Was A Terrible Candidate Because He Is A Liberal

So says Steve Baldwin, here, who unaccountably fails to mention that team Obama wanted Romney to be the Republican candidate for that very reason:

"[A]s any conservative from Massachusetts knew, Romney was a liberal at heart who, as Governor, led the nation in passing three of the left’s most sacred issues: Same sex marriage, Cap and Trade, and government control of health care. ...

Romney’s liberal record on taxes (yes, he taxed the corporate world in Massachusetts), Cap and Trade (first in the nation!), gay marriage, gay rights, quotas, gun control, immigration, etc, etc. was little known outside of Massachusetts because many of America’s leading conservatives decided to portray him as someone he wasn’t. Even a number of prominent right to life and national pro-family groups and leaders made a decision to remake Romney as a conservative even though they knew he was not. I should know; I briefed many of them about Romney’s record. Had the conservative leadership told the truth about Romney’s record as Governor, it’s likely he wouldn’t have won the GOP nomination."

That tells you all you need to know about the Republican Party, which doesn't just settle for liberalism. It settles for liberalism of the worst kind. And the so-called conservatives cooperated.

To hell with all of them.

Rich Guy Prick Warren Buffett Votes For Suppressing The Middle Class

Warren Buffett, here, says raising taxes on the rich would lift the morale of the middle class.

On the contrary, it would help keep the middle class in its place by making it more expensive to get where he is, and more importantly help keep the rich in their place because they can afford it.

Just the way the rich like it.

What a prick.

Tammy Bruce Needs To Have Her Head Examined, Again

Final Results Utah 4th Congressional District 2012

This morning Tammy Bruce is ranting and raving as guest host for Laura Ingraham about how a black Republican woman narrowly lost to the incumbent liberal white man, Democrat Rep. Jim Matheson in UT-4.

That's rich. A gay libertarian independent complaining about a Republican losing by 768 votes in a narrow race to a Democrat where the Libertarian Party candidate clearly played the spoiler by garnering eight times that margin.

Ideas have consequences.

How S&P500 Might Be Not Just An Index But A Price Target

Another proverbial construction from John Hussman, who remains concerned, here:

'With little respite, the Shiller P/E has been above 22 since 1995, and the average Shiller P/E since that time has been over 27. To load that stretch into the calculation of the “normal level” destroys the whole concept of a norm: the valuation norm should be the level that is reasonably associated with “normal” subsequent market returns.'

Obama Finally Beats Bush 2004 . . . By 0.03 Points

The final results are still not in, but Obama's re-election totals finally best Bush's 2004 result by 0.03 points.

Bush finished 2004 with 50.73% of the vote. Obama now has 50.76%, after weeks of counting.

Way to go, Brownie! And start the mandate parade.

43% More Housing Destroyed By Hurricane Sandy Than Katrina

Obama Seen Helping Hurricane Sandy Victims

Story here:

305,000 housing units have been destroyed by Sandy compared to 214,000 in Katrina.

Truman Cut Spending Big Time In 1945. The Economy Boomed.

Speaker John Boehner, wake up.

Arnold Kling, here:

When World War II ended in 1945, President Harry Truman faced a problem. Public opinion called for a rapid demobilization that would bring the boys home as soon as possible. But the Keynesians who were gaining prominence in the economics profession warned that a rapid decline in government spending and the size of the public work force would produce, in the late economist Paul Samuelson’s words, “the greatest period of unemployment and dislocation which any economy has ever faced.”

Thankfully, Truman ignored the Keynesians. Government spending plummeted by nearly two-thirds between 1945 and 1947, from $93 billion to $36.3 billion in nominal terms. If we used the “multiplier” of 1.5 for government spending that is favored by Obama administration economists, that $63.7 billion plunge should have caused GDP to fall by $95 billion, a 40 percent economic decline. In reality, GDP increased almost 10 percent during that period, from $223 billion in 1945 to $244.1 billion in 1947. This is a rare precedent of a large drop in government spending, so its economic consequences are important to understand.

Pravda Says Illiterate Americans From Communist Controlled Schools Elected Communist Obama As President Of An America Suffering From A Psychosis Called Liberalism

That about sums it up.

From the Department of It Takes One To Know One, English.Pravda.ru, here:

Obama's Soviet Mistake

19.11.2012 15:23

By Xavier Lerma

Putin in 2009 outlined his strategy for economic success. Alas, poor Obama did the opposite but nevertheless was re-elected. Bye, bye Miss American Pie. The Communists have won in America with Obama but failed miserably in Russia with Zyuganov who only received 17% of the vote. Vladimir Putin was re-elected as President keeping the NWO order out of Russia while America continues to repeat the Soviet mistake. ...

Recently, Obama has been re-elected for a 2nd term by an illiterate society and he is ready to continue his lies of less taxes while he raises them. He gives speeches of peace and love in the world while he promotes wars as he did in Egypt, Libya and Syria. He plans his next war is with Iran as he fires or demotes his generals who get in the way.

Putin said regarding the military,

"...instead of solving the problem, militarization pushes it to a deeper level. It draws away from the economy immense financial and material resources, which could have been used much more efficiently elsewhere."

Well, any normal individual understands that as true but liberalism is a psychosis. O'bomber even keeps the war going along the Mexican border with projects like "fast and furious" and there is still no sign of ending it. He is a Communist without question promoting the Communist Manifesto without calling it so. How shrewd he is in America. His cult of personality mesmerizes those who cannot go beyond their ignorance. They will continue to follow him like those fools who still praise Lenin and Stalin in Russia.  Obama's fools and Stalin's fools share the same drink of illusion.

Reading Putin's speech without knowing the author, one would think it was written by Reagan or another conservative in America. The speech promotes smaller government and less taxes. It comes as no surprise to those who know Putin as a conservative. Vladimir Putin went on to say:

"...we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimizing state expenses. The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country and the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state. There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results. Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt - are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game. During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure no one would want history to repeat itself."

President Vladimir Putin could never have imagined anyone so ignorant or so willing to destroy their people like Obama much less seeing millions vote for someone like Obama. They read history in America don't they? Alas, the schools in the U.S. were conquered by the Communists long ago and history was revised thus paving the way for their Communist presidents. Obama has bailed out those businesses that voted for him and increased the debt to over 16 trillion with an ever increasing unemployment rate especially among blacks and other minorities. All the while promoting his agenda.

"We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success."- Vladimir Putin

The red, white and blue still flies happily but only in Russia. Russia still has St George defeating the Dragon with the symbol of the cross on its flag. The ACLU and other atheist groups in America would never allow the US flag with such religious symbols. Lawsuits a plenty against religious freedom and expression in the land of the free. Christianity in the U.S. is under attack as it was during the early period of the Soviet Union when religious symbols were against the law.   

Let's give American voters the benefit of the doubt and say it was all voter fraud and not ignorance or stupidity in electing a man who does not even know what to do and refuses help from Russia when there was an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Instead we'll say it's true that the Communists usage of electronic voting was just a plan to manipulate the vote. Soros and his ownership of the company that counts the US votes in Spain helped put their puppet in power in the White House. According to the Huffington Post, residents in all 50 states have filed petitions to secede from the Unites States. We'll say that these Americans are hostages to the Communists in power. How long will their government reign tyranny upon them?

Russia lost its civil war with the Reds and millions suffered torture and death for almost 75 years under the tyranny of the United Soviet Socialist Republic. Russians survived with a new and stronger faith in God and ever growing Christian Church. The question is how long will the once "Land of the Free" remain the United Socialist States of America? Their suffering has only begun. Bye bye Miss American Pie! You know the song you hippies. Sing it! Don't you remember? The 1971 hit song by American song writer Don McLean. ...

Joel Kotkin Urges Republicans To Join The Class War

"It’s time for Republicans to break with the traditions of Goldwater, Reagan, and, particularly, Bush and shift to something more akin to the party’s roots in the mid-19th century. This party needs less preaching and libertarian manifestos that essentially defend plutocracy. Instead it’s time to embrace class warfare on today’s gentry, and embrace the aspirations of today’s middle-class. Honest Abe in 2016?"

Egging on the Republicans to embrace Marxist class categories and methods and pretending that's not an appeal to ideology, Joel Kotkin here thinks Republicans could win again if only they gave stuff to the yeoman class and took away stuff from the clerisy. You know, like his hero Pres. Abraham Lincoln did when he signed the Homestead Act in 1862, which gave away 160 acres out west to anyone who would improve the land, and when he signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which took away the property of slaveholders without compensation. Like all good dictators, Lincoln made notions of property and its value even more arbitrary than they had been before.

It is little appreciated how the Homestead Act basically destroyed the flexibility of the federal revenue system, causing the federal government to rely increasingly on tariffs and also excises which up until The War Between The States had fluctuated up and down as revenues from federal land sales did the same.

So Anderson and Martin, here, who emphasize the substitutability of tariff and land sales revenues:


"Coinciding with the rapid increase in land grants to homesteaders, railroads, and the states after 1862, the federal revenue derived from land sales fell rapidly as a proportion of total receipts. Further, the general decline in tariff rates that had occurred until the Civil War was reversed, and tariff rates began to rise rapidly. Import duty rates, which had reached their lowest level in the century in 1857, increased sharply during the Civil War and remained high for the remainder of the century (Baack and Ray 1983, p. 73). Tariffs continued to be the single most important source of federal revenue after the war ended."

So in an important sense, Lincoln and the Republicans are to blame not just for the development of Our Enemy, The State, they are also to blame for setting the untenable conditions to fund it as it henceforth and inevitably grew large. In the end, the price of Union and black emancipation would be universal bondage to Leviathan with the coming of the Income Tax in 1913.

Kotkin completely misses the significance of what's going on on the right. Conservatives in America are rediscovering the meaning of the constitution, and how people like Lincoln ruined it. Mitt Romney with his incessant talk of American supremacy in the world simply reminded them too much of him.

Kotkin's correct about one thing, though, that the socialism of Obama is misunderstood. But Kotkin doesn't call it the fascism that it is, because Kotkin himself actually advocates it himself, only that it's the good kind which helps grow the middle class.

From the comments section, Kotkin says as much:

"i am an old-style democrat who favors using government when necessary to create an ever-larger property owning class. neither party today has this as its main focus. instead both are neo-feudalist as I will explain in the coming months."

Old style democrat? You know, the FDR kind, which admired and imitated the strong men of Europe, who eventually plunged the world into a war far bloodier than, but no less reminiscent of, Lincoln's.

Conservatives want to get rid of the imperial presidency, not just get one friendly to its interests.

Joel Kotkin's "New Geography" isn't old enough.

Obama's New Favorite Beer

Gold to oil ratio finishes the week at 19.84

Another week, another deformed metric. Oil remains on sale relative to gold because the money is moving to gold, a broader vote of "No confidence" in the global economy.

Gang Of Sixer, Sen. Chambliss, Proves His Liberalism

Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia always seemed a weak sister.

Now he's proved it once and for all, here, and here, by repudiating his pledge to vote against tax rate increases.

That's an alarming development for Republicans because it indicates that Chambliss is not just threatening to vote for more revenues from deduction limitations, but for more revenues from tax rate increases.

Look at it this way: a vote for tax increases is a vote to maintain the status quo, which can only mean more of the same, including further increased prices for commodities, which is at the center of Sen. Chambliss' unholy alliances.

Follow the money people! This guy doesn't care about the country. He only cares about himself!

"And A Fatherless Child Shall Lead Them"

A fatherless president for a fatherless nation

Americans narrowly re-elected a fatherless child to lead them as "broken families" begin to outnumber intact ones in the voter rolls.

Rebecca Hagelin for USNews.com, here, identifies the broken family trend creating today's voter:

Noted social science researcher Patrick Fagan points out that in 1950, for every 100 babies born in America, 12 were born to a broken family—that is, they were either born out of wedlock or to a family that would suffer divorce. Fast forward to today, and for every 100 babies born in America, over 60 are born to broken families.

The results of the latest census reported by Liz Peek for TheFiscalTimes.com, here, starkly depict the consequent disappearance of traditional America and its replacement by a broken one:

The 2010 Census reported that for the first time in our history, married couples make up less than half of all households. The traditional family with a mom, dad and children now constitute less than 20 percent of American households, down from 43 percent in 1950.

Whatever else may be said about Barack Obama, Americans have re-elected him to a large extent because he resembles them in the most elemental way which people like Mitt Romney and John McCain do not.

Let's Face It, Republicans Helped Create "The Takers"

It's time for a reality check. Republicans bear heavy responsibility for creating "the takers", the infamous 47% of households who pay no taxes.

The real reason Mitt Romney lost the election is because he couldn't get Reagan Democrats to turn out for him enthusiastically, people for whom dissing the whole idea behind the tax credit programs expanded by Reagan and Bush 43 to subsidize working families just like them sounded foreign coming from the mouth of a Republican candidate for president. I refer to the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit.

Reagan had made the former his answer to welfare dependency, and George W. Bush further expanded it and also doubled the latter, to the point that now, as the Tax Policy Center says here:

[T]he Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit . . . are the major reason many low-income working families avoid the income tax. About one-third of those who don’t pay are families with kids.

This New York Times graphic, using Tax Foundation data, shows how the percentage of non-taxpaying filers had grown by over 50% since 1986 through the end of the Bush presidency, and now under Obama has really ramped up another 50% so that since the time of the 1986 tax reform twice as many filers have no federal tax liability as did twenty-five years ago. If Obama has doubled down on anything, they were Republican ideas to begin with. To paraphrase an old saw, We sold them the rope they're hanging us with. 

What once seemed like benign Reagan era social props have grown into major federal welfare transfer payment programs for the lower and middle classes in America, which is why liberals like Tim Noah here deliberately don't focus on them in analyzing the takers, "the 47%". To do so mutes their point that these people still pay the regressive payroll tax, which the EITC offsets. But practiced long enough, these lower wage workers getting EITC payments every year until retirement will collect Social Security without having really contributed to it themselves, transforming it, for them, from a contribution based pension into pure welfare.

Democrats are more than happy to have Republicans do this dirty work for them in expanding the federal welfare state instead of just acting as they do in more somnolent times as mere tax collectors for it. During the next five years, these direct subsidies to families are projected to cost the Treasury over $90 billion each year. In 2011 alone there were over 26 million EITC claims costing the taxpayers nearly $59 billion. 

This issue goes to the heart of Mitt Romney's problem with the Republican Party: He had the temerity to point out the dependency practiced by too many Republicans. Unfortunately for Mitt Romney and the country, he had no constituency for this message, or at least not enough of one to get him over the top.

More than ever I suspect that this way of thinking is what was behind Mitt Romney's interest in "rectitude" in "equalizing" taxes when he was governor of Massachusetts, but also accounts for his statements distancing himself from the Reagan record in the 1990s when he ran against Sen. Ted Kennedy, just when Rep. Newt Gingrich was about to unleash The Contract With America. Reagan might have been an anti-communist conservative, but a fiscal conservative he was not, at least not in practice. That's what was really important to Romney at the time and obviously still animates him. But not his party which has made zero progress toward fiscal conservatism and has gone the other way.

Say what you will about Romney's social liberalism, it was his fiscal conservatism which alienated him not just from Democrats, but also from anyone receiving a big tax refund every spring.

A famous Democrat once said, "I didn't leave the Democrat Party, the Democrat Party left me." But a fiscal conservative can't say the same of the Republican Party . . . in living memory it's never been there.

(graphic here)

Obama 2012 Now Ties Bush 2004 With 50.73% Of Popular Vote

As all votes get tallied since the election two weeks ago on November 6, total votes cast in the presidential are now up to 125.53 million and Barack Obama achieves the dubious distinction of matching George W. Bush exactly in the percentage of the popular vote received.

Way to go, Brownie! 

Reed Galen And His Ilk Confuse Television With Reality

Well why not? His parents probably used television as a baby sitter. The video here shows Reed Galen sporting a ginormous wristwatch and more neurotic hand gestures per second than I can count.

Here are his recent remarks about television:

The ABC sitcom “Modern Family” is an excellent reference point for the problems of today’s Republican Party. One of the most popular shows on television, it features, among other things, a Latina immigrant and her son and a gay couple with an adopted daughter.

Those characters are not merely a paean to political correctness: They are the glue of the show. And for Americans under 45, they are not seen as objects of scorn or derision but a reflection -- albeit through Hollywood’s funhouse mirror -- of what the country looks like today.

Someday someone is going to kick Reed Galen's ass but good, or his kids' ass if he actually has any, or something worse, which they'll deserve but won't assimilate because it's already too late for them.

Obviously his baby boomer parents never taught him anything, which is why the country looks like it does today, and deserves everything it's going to get.

Reed Galen formerly served in the losing John McCain for president campaign.

63% Of Congress Voted For Bailouts, 75% Of Democrats

Here.

I hate to quote myself, but someone's got to do it.

Paul Krugman Really Wants To Increase Taxes On The Middle Class

Fair taxation looks like the rates of the 1950s, says Paul Krugman, here:

"America in the 1950s made the rich pay their fair share."

What he's not telling you, however, is that America made the poor pay their "fair share" too in the 1950s, which today they are not doing. Even liberals agree 47% of the American people today don't pay any income taxes whatsoever. But at the 1950s rates, nearly 60% of today's workers, almost 90 million out of 151 million total American workers, would actually be paying income taxes, and paying income taxes big time, at a marginal rate of 20% instead of the low Bush rates of 10% and 15%, if they pay any income taxes at all.

Can you say, "Big middle class tax increase if Krugman got his way"?

The tax rates Krugman refers to come from the Internal Revenue Code of 1954. If those rates were in effect today, the rich at Obama's beloved $200,000 a year level would be in the 59% bracket instead of in his 39.5% bracket, which makes Obama look like not simply a conservative by comparison with Krugman, but a reactionary by comparison with Bill Clinton.

More to the point, under Truman's rates in 1952 applied to today "the rich" would be in the 66% bracket. So high marginal tax rates on "the rich" actually came down from 66% under Truman to 59% under Eisenhower. Krugman is disingenous in portraying 1950s rates as some draconian trend to punish the rich when in fact Eisenhower was practicing the art of the possible in his time, trying to lower taxation while still trying to pay off the massive debt accumulated during World War II. Compare that to today when the chief liberal sticking point on taxes is the difference between the top marginal rate under Bush of 35% and the top marginal rate under Clinton of 39.5%.

Almost never was so much made of so little.

One critical difference between Obama's stated position and Paul Krugman's, however, is that while the president's marginal rate of 39.5% would remain the last rate on the ladder, Krugman would expand the ladder with additional marginal rates all the way up to 91% as was done in the Revenue Code of 1954.

Only a fanatic would think that that's part of what's possible today. Not even Obama thinks that.

Yet.

That Light At The End Of The Tunnel?

Better run. Here comes the ObamaCare train.

Was Socialist France The Model For ObamaCare's 50 Worker Rule?

Mike Tanner for The New York Post, here:

Under ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time workers must provide health insurance for all their workers, paying at least 65% of the cost of a family policy or 85% of the cost of an individual plan. Moreover, the insurance must meet the federal government’s requirements in terms of what benefits are included, meaning that many businesses that offer insurance to their workers today will have to change to new, more expensive plans. ...

Under the circumstances, how likely is the company to hire that 50th worker? Or, if a company already has 50 workers, isn’t the company likely to lay off one employee? Or cut hours and make some employees part time, thus getting under the 50 employee cap? Indeed, a study by Mercer found that 18% of companies were likely to do exactly that. It’s worth noting that in France, another country where numerous government regulations kick in at 50 workers, there are 1,500 companies with 48 employees and 1,600 with 49 employees, but just 660 with 50 and only 500 with 51.

Tanner might have emphasized that as companies become 49ers because of ObamaCare, the workers will increasingly become 29ers, part-timers who are exempted from coverage under ObamaCare because they are deliberately kept to 29 hours per week.

After being 99ers for so long, that's about as good as it's going to get.

To The Associated Press, Sadomasochism Is Just A "Subculture"

Crown Roast of Wiener

Seen here:

[Castro District] Supervisor Scott Wiener's proposal would make it illegal for a person over the age of 5 to "expose his or her genitals, perineum or anal region on any public street, sidewalk, street median, parklet or plaza" or while using public transit.

A first offense would carry a maximum penalty of a $100 fine, but prosecutors would have authority to charge a third violation as a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $500 fine and a year in jail. Exemptions would be made for participants at permitted street fairs and parades, such as the city's annual gay pride event and the Folsom Street Fair, which celebrates sadomasochism and other sexual subcultures.

Since about 1994 sadomasochism et cetera have not been considered mental illnesses by medical authorities when such deviancies are "consensual". Evidently the public in San Francisco no longer consents to the regular assaults against their eyes from assorted naked exhibitionists of deviancy, which should on that logic make such malefactors henceforth technically mentally ill once again.

Wow, wasn't that easy?

Accordingly we should now be able to say that, since libertarians advocate freedom for such deviancies but habitually fail at the polls, libertarians also are mentally ill because they do not enjoy the consent of the governed. 

The followers of libertarian Jude Wanniski continue to assert that the electorate always gets it right, so since the electorate repudiates libertarianism time and time again libertarians must be mentally ill.

It remains unknown if libertarianism ever was considered a mental disorder by authorities, however.

Needless to say, the date from which civilization may be said to have ended now has been postponed thanks to San Francisco Castro District Supervisor Scott Wiener.

Great name.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Wittiest Line Of The Week Past

"The generals are being led by their privates."

-- Rush Limbaugh

Thousands Of French Protest Genitally Modified Marriage

Story here:

Marc, a 60-year-old Parisian who said he was a fervent Catholic, called the government hypocritical. “They all have wives and children. So they understand perfectly well what kind of deviations would result from the approval of gay marriages.”

He was holding a sign that read “No to genitally modified marriage”.

Austin, MN, Hires Part-Timer To Save $18K On "Benefits"

"Benefits", as in health insurance.

The guy will work 30 hours per week and make $60K a year, but will get no benefits.

Story here:

He will not receive fringe benefits of pension, health insurance, life insurance or disability insurance. ... With the hiring of Erichson as a flex-time employee, the HRA [Housing and Redevelopment Authority] will save about a total of $38,000 ($20,000 in salary and $18,000 in benefits). The arrangement is planned to be revisited after one year of employment.

Yeah, at which time he'll be cut to 29 hours per week.

Capisce?

Community College Cuts Part-Timers' Hours To Avoid ObamaCare Costs

The Cheerleaders Against ObamaCare

The Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania will cut 400 part-timers' hours to less than 30 hours per week to save $6 million in costs mandated by ObamaCare.

Story here.

Companies everywhere are in revolt against ObamaCare, which mandates coverage be offered when full-time workers exceed 49 in number, but full-time now "redefined" as 30 hours worked on average per week instead of 34 or 35. Leftism is nothing if not based on constant redefinition of reality.

So the path is clear if you're an employer: reduce full-time positions to 49 and part-time everyone else to no more than 29 hours per week. The result in America will be fewer and fewer full-time jobs and inadequate part-time jobs for more and more people, many of whom will be unable to afford to buy insurance through one-size-fits-all ObamaCare and will be thrown into state Medicaid programs where they will receive healthcare which you wouldn't wish on Fido or Morris.

ObamaCare is an ugly war on jobs, and is reminiscent of nothing so much as Stalin's war on the Kulaks of Ukraine, whom he starved to death when collectivization failed to produce the "mandated" amount of wheat. People will not begin to appreciate the comparison I suppose until our government decides the size threshold of companies must be lowered to, say, 39 full-time employees from 49 to get ObamaCare to "work", and to, say, 20 hours per week from 29 to mandate "more coverage". But by then business will already be flat on its back and the size of the proletariat will have swelled. Single payer can't be far behind.

They are saying out there that Romney lost because he focused on too many numbers, but Obama is using mandated numbers to slowly crucify you.

UGLY.

What A Shock. Senator Elect "Independent" Angus King Of Maine To Caucus With Dems

The Boston Globe has the story here about the two-term former Governor's victory:

Republican-aligned groups spent $3.7 million in a losing attempt to defeat King. The National Republican Senatorial Committee dumped $1.3 million, while Crossroads GPS spent about $1 million.

The Democrat in the race for Senate in Maine, Cynthia Dill, who thought she was running against Todd Akin of Missouri, came in a very distant third with 13% of the vote behind the Republican in distant second with about 31% of the vote to King's 53%.

King's enthusiasms appear to be fingerprinting and windmills.

Your Food Costs More Because Of Obama's Stalinist EPA Ethanol Policy

Feed prices have skyrocketed as a result of drought and dedication of ever larger portions of corn harvests to fuel production instead of for feed, and it will get much much worse according to this in depth story in The Detroit News:

This year, the Renewable Fuel Standard requires the use of 13.2 billion gallons of corn ethanol, the production of which could require using more than half the country's corn crop, up from 5 billion gallons in 2007.

Next year, the standard increases to 13.9 billion gallons. By 2022, the U.S. must use 36 billion gallons of biofuels, though 21 billion gallons are supposed to be from advanced cellulosic ethanol.

This Will Get Your Account At Twitter Deleted

Story here.

Boycott United Parcel Service For Defunding Scouting

UPS is cutting off the Boy Scouts over homosexuality, as noted here:

The UPS Foundation, which gave more than $85,000 to the Boy Scouts in 2011, announced this week that it is cutting off the Scouts because they won’t allow openly homosexual scoutmasters or members. Millions of boys and men who have been involved with the Scouts support their moral stand against normalizing homosexuality.

Total Votes Cast In Presidential Election Reaches 124.69 Million

Obama is up to 50.66% in the popular vote, up from 50.61% on Thursday.

At this rate he may yet prove as popular as George Bush in 2004 (50.73%).

Libertarians Help Elect Democrat Bisexual In Arizona

There's no mention in the various stories at Politico that the controversial and expensive race between the Democrat Sinema and the black Republican Parker was spoiled for the latter by a libertarian candidate whose platform included open voter suppression.

AZCentral reported here:

The spoiler in the race may turn out to be Libertarian candidate Powell Gammill, who garnered more than 10,000 votes, despite urging voters during an October televised debate to stay home on Election Day in protest of the political system.

Bushie AEI Joins Drumbeat To Raise Taxes On Middle Class

Here.

I'm pretty sure the author, Sita Nataraj Slavov, wasn't raised in Milwaukee, but you never know these days.

 

Link fixed.

Three Liberal Republican Defenders Of Gay Rights Defeated Last Week

Rep. Judy Biggert of Illinois, Rep. Mary Bono Mack of California and Rep. Nan Hayworth of New York, all endorsed by the Log Cabin Republicans, are gone after 2012.

Rep. Cao lost his seat in 2010. Liz Carter couldn't beat the infamous Rep. Hank Johnson in 2010. John Dennis couldn't beat the infamous Rep. Pelosi in 2010 or in 2012 in what is now CA-12. Rep. Dent was handily re-elected in 2012. Rep. Djou won the special election in 2010 and promptly lost in November of that year. Mattie Fein failed to unseat Rep. Harman in 2010. Rep. Hanna handily won in NY-22 in 2012. Rep. Lance handily won re-election in 2012. Rep. Platts retires in 2013 and so does the district, merging with PA-04. Rep. Reichert handily won re-election in 2012. Rep. Ros-Lehtinen won in 2012 in the new FL-27 district.

See the Politico story here for a list of all incumbents of both parties who lost last week.

CNBC Adopts Overt Advocacy Against Fiscal Cliff

Their explanation is here.

And it's completely stupid, as usual from these people, for whom a recession constitutes "dire consequences" and is unthinkable.

CNBC should consider that sequestration was passed by the Congress, and that the expiration of the Bush tax cuts was passed by the Congress. So to oppose these acts of Congress instead of simply reporting them as facts constitutes advocacy, pure and simple.

CNBC. My new comedy channel.